Connectivity & Communications Posts - Page 21

If you thought that you dream of getting 4G was getting close, well those bandwidth goal posts just moved, a lot. While the Mobile World Congress festivities are still bubbling along, the European Commission have just announced research grants for 5G mobile technology.

The news comes from the European Commission VP Neelie Kroes, who said that they're pumping approximately $65.4 million into research grants for 5G mobile technology, where they hope to have it online by 2020. Kroes said "I want 5G to be pioneered by European industry, based on European research and creating jobs in Europe - and we will put our money where our mouth is."

It's long been a contention that the advertised speeds are an "up to" rating meaning that the ISP doesn't actually have to provide that speed. Consumers generally expect that the advertised speed is the speed that they will be receiving at their house. The FCC monitors the actual versus advertised speed and has reported some data for September of last year.

According to the FCC's data, more than half of the major ISPs failed to meet the advertised download speed. An additional three meet the advertised speed when averaged over 24 hours, but fell short of the advertised speed during the peak hours of 7-11p.m. The chart of data can be seen above. Upload speeds can be seen below.

When it comes to upload, the companies performed better. Only four of the 15 companies didn't provide advertised upload speeds. It just goes to show that not all ISPs are created equal.

Users of Sprint with 4G LTE devices in Washington DC, San Francisco, and New York City should be able to pick up spotty LTE coverage. It appears that Sprint has started flipping the switch on towers in those cities without making an official announcement. It's likely they're testing the towers ahead of an official launch.

Coverage has been spotty meaning that not all towers have been turned on. Once the coverage is officially announced and made live, users should expect a blanket of LTE goodness. Sprint has confirmed that the cell towers were turned on for testing and that the company decided to leave them on until the official announcement so that users could continue using LTE.

We have been hearing rumors of Microsoft's plans to transition users of its MSN / Live Messenger service over to Skype for a while now, and today it appears that we have an official date. The transition will begin taking place on April 8th of this year.

The upgrade will target English users first and then trickle down to the rest of the world, over the rest of the month. This news comes shortly after a confusing email which alluded to all Live Messenger services shutting down on April 15th, which is not true.

"The upgrade process itself has been going really well, we've had millions of customers move over", said Skype's Parri Munsell. The transition process begins when existing Live Messenger users are greeted with an upgrade notification. The upgrade will prevent users from signing in to the messaging service using the existing Live Messenger application. Microsoft is pre-caching existing machines with the Skype installer so that the upgrade will appear seamless.

While some people are still stuck using 3G, including most Sprint users, many countries around the world have been upgraded to 4G LTE. OpenSignal, a company that crowdsources signal maps for different carriers around the world, is reporting that Sweden's LTE is the fastest in the world.

Unfortunately for users in the United States, our LTE speeds come in at eighth overall. Above us is Sweden, Hong Kong, Denmark, Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Germany. After Germany, the speed really drops off from 14 Mbps to 9.6 Mbps in the United States. Japan follows behind us with 7.1 Mbps.

Part of the reason for this could be due to carriers in the United States only having access to 20MHz of spectrum for their network. In Sweden, and most other countries, carriers have double that amount available, which gives them more bandwidth. If you're on 4G LTE, what's the fastest speed you've seen?

AT&T has acquired part of the 700MHz B band spectrum from Verizon for $1.9 billion in cash. This spectrum acquisition by AT&T will allow the company to boost its US LTE rollout. According to AT&T, the new 700MHz license will allow AT&T to rollout LTE to more than 42 million people across 18 US states, including California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.

AT&T says this spectrum purchase will "complement [its] existing holdings in the 700 MHz B band and will allow AT&T to continue to deploy 4G LTE services to meet demand for mobile Internet services on a wide array of smartphones, tablets and other devices."

AT&T has been in an acquisition mode as of late. Just a few days ago, AT&T paid $780 million to acquire Alltel's US wireless business. It plans to use this acquisition to expand rural coverage. The spectrum acquisition is subject to regulatory approval, so it hasn't closed yet. Once the transaction is approved, AT&T believes the deal will close "in the second half of 2013."

Google, according to CNET, is looking to acquire wireless spectrum. Before you get all excited about a Google wireless carrier or Google wireless broadband, you should know that Google is reportedly not after the spectrum for a new service. Instead, they are looking to acquire the spectrum to conduct testing.

An application by Google was filed last week and asks permission to test frequencies in the 2524 to 2546 MHz range and the 2567 to 2625MHz range. Clearwire currently uses these spectrum ranges for its 4G WiMax wireless broadband service. Google had previously owned a stake in the company up until last year.

One of CNET's sources has said that Google is only interested in using the spectrum for testing and nothing else. Google has declined to comment on the request. If Google were to create a wireless broadband company or wireless carrier service, would you be inclined to switch? What would it take?

At the US Conference of Mayors' Winter Meeting, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has voiced opinion for at least one "gigabit community" in all 50 states by 2015. The FCC Chairman wants a Google Fiber-like gigabit network across the US and believes that "establishing gigabit communities nationwide will accelerate the creation of a critical mass of markets and innovation hubs" enabled by the gigabit Internet connectivity.

At the moment, 42 communities in 14 states feature fiber optic Internet providers, but most of those installations aren't pushing gigabit speeds. In order to help out with the gigabit rollout, the FCC chairman has announced plans to create a new online and publicly accessable clearinghouse to collect and disseminate information about how to get the costs down, as well as increase the speed of broadband deployment across the United States.

We now have the problem of who would pay for it, as the current worldwide economy isn't strong to have the US government wholly fund the project. Could we see a telco or two step in, or Google possibly half finance the project? It looks like Internet access in the US is about to get interesting.

Currently USB 3.0 offers 5Gbps and with even cheap $150 SSDs offering read speeds of close to, or exceeding 500MB/sec, USB 3.0 is now... old. Well, the USB 3.0 Promoter Group has announced that an upcoming enhancement for USB 3.0 is on its way and will:

We should expect this new injection of speed to hit USB 3.0 in the middle of the year, and will also include improved data encoding for more efficient data transfer as well as backward compatibility for current 5Gbps USB 3.0 hubs and devices, including USB 2.0-based hardware. We should hear more during CES, but it's great to see USB 3.0 being pumped up to 10Gbps, the future is looking mighty fast!

Time Warner Cable has announced that they are increasing the speed of their "Standard" service by 50 percent. This means the new "Standard" speed will be 15mbps, as opposed to the current 10mbps. There is no mention of an increase in price. To get the increased speed, you can reset your modem by unplugging it for 10 seconds.

Alternatively, you can wait for it to automatically be rolled out to your division.